Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad casts his vote in the 2012 polls

Iran is holding its first elections since 2009. even as the leaders of its main opposition group remain under house arrest.

The poll to select 290 members of the parliament, the Majlis, is widely seen as a contest between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The president and the ayatollah are both conservatives and profess roughly the same ideology. But analysts say their agreements mask deep antipathy, which developed after Khamenei supported Ahmadinejad in the 2009 poll.